Thoughts, reviews, rants, laments, and general chatting about the wonderful world(s) of comic books.

Sep 23, 2015

On the Run: Mark Waid’s The Flash - Part 3 - Ghost Story

If you’ll forgive the
appropriation, in the era we’re considering, there is a spectre haunting the DC
Universe—the spectre of Barry Allen.

I’m going to
be a little more academic this time around than in the last couple of articles,
and probably more so than in any of the ones that will follow. I suggested in
my first Flash article that Barry
Allen is a nostalgically-relevant character. Derrida calls it, in Spectres of Marx, “this first paternal
character, as powerful as it is unreal, a hallucination or simulacrum that is
virtually more actual than what is so blithely called a living presence.” There’s
a lot to unpack there. The use of the term “simulacrum” immediately calls to
mind Baudrillard and his musings on the postmodern, but I’m not sure that’s a
line of questioning that is necessarily fruitful in thinking Barry Allen as
spectre. Derrida notes, early in the text, that he makes a mistake in calling
on the “spectres” of Marx, in the plural, as the first line of The Communist Manifesto, which I
borrowed to open this piece, invokes a spectre in the singular. But this
mistake is propitious, in that there are varied spectres of Marx, those that
haunt his ideological children and those that haunt his ideological opposites.
He calls this the “haunting obsession that seems…to organize the dominant influence on discourse today,”
that “no disavowal [of Socialist thought] has managed to rid itself of all of
Marx’s ghosts.” From this perspective, Marx, or his spectre, haunts the
neo-liberal organizings of society and culture, haunts the hegemonic and the
repressive. In some ways, too, this spectre haunts the Marxists, the
Socialists, of the world. Derrida calls the “Marxist inheritance…absolutely and
thoroughly determinate…We live in a world, some would say a culture, that still
bears…the mark of this inheritance.” What Marx (and Engels, to be fair) have to
say to us is still being said to us, still fundamentally describes a situation
within which we all exist, regardless of whether we celebrate that situation or
not.

But let’s
move on from that. The notion of this haunting, of hauntology, is taken up in
popular culture by thinkers of electronic music. Mark Fisher restates some of
Derrida’s more impenetrable prose by describing hauntology as the “restatement
of the key deconstructive claim that ‘being’ is not equivalent to presence.” By this point, if you’re
still reading, you’re wondering what this has to do with the Flash. It’s this: Flash is a comic that is haunted by
Barry Allen. Fisher phrases it thus, while discussing the hiss and crackle of a
phonograph recording being redeployed in a contemporary piece of electronic
music: “The surface noise of the sample unsettles the illusion of presence in
at least two ways: first, temporally, by alerting us to the fact that what we
are listening to is a phonographic revenant; and second, ontologically, by
introducing the technical frame, the material pre-condition of the recording,
on the level of content.” What I’ll argue here is that the costume that Wally
wears is the equivalent of this crackle. We see Wally/Flash as present, as a
character in and of himself. This is just not true, however. Even Wally himself
admits that he lives in the shadow of Barry Allen, that Barry Allen taught him
everything, made him everything that he is. The costume is evidence. As with
the crackle, it unsettles our illusion of presence by temporally constantly
hearkening back to Barry Allen. Yes, there are slight variations, whether due
to artistic license or to the active changing by Wally of the costume, but it
is still fundamentally the costume that Barry Allen wore in comics for 30
years. As such, though we read a comic set, ostensibly, in the present, the
costume is the crackle that reminds us that what we are reading is in some ways
a “visual revenant.” From an ontological stance, what we might consider as the
metatextual level of the costume’s unsettling nature, the “material condition”
of the artwork, the concealment beneath the crimson cowl of an individual makes
that individual virtually indistinguishable from any other piece of art
featuring that character, past, present, or future. (For the record, later into
the title’s publication history, Bart Allen dons the scarlet costume and, again,
becomes indistinguishable from Barry or Wally.) Fisher says of this crackle
effect “[w]e are suddenly made aware again of what the first listeners to
phonograph recordings were acutely conscious: that we are witnessing a captured
slice of the past irrupting into the present.” And is this not what we are
seeing each and every time Wally puts on his Flash costume, a captured slice of
the past irrupting, at high speed, into the present?

But so what?
Comics have always had, or at least for a very long time now have had, this
generational aspect to them, so what does it matter to note that this costume
reminds us of a character long dead? Well, it’s not just us who are reminded.
As I’ve just said, Wally is constantly reminded, and reminding himself, of all
that he owes to Barry Allen. This legacy, as Derrida notes for Marx, is
absolute and determinate. Be a hero, help as many people as you can. Be good.
Be like me. Barry does not have presence in the comic, but he has being, and it
is a being, a set of expectations laid down not only by the character but by
the writers who have invoked him after death, that Wally, but certainly not
only Wally, constantly struggle to live up to. What we, and Wally, wait for is
the moment of fulfillment, either of the failure to live up to the being of
expectation, or of the achievement of those things that we perceive as the
fundamentalities of that being. These are two of the spectres of Allen that
haunt us. And they do haunt us. We read The
Flash are we’re intrinsically aware that there is this paragon, ghostly but
a paragon nonetheless, to which our focal character, and we by association,
must live up to. Wally tries. So do we. But how can we live up to something
that simply has being? Is not presence, actuality, fundamentally influenced and
changed by existence in a material realm? Being can exist outside of time,
outside of causality. Presence is the manifestation of being in time. And time
changes all things. If we are truly to exist as presences in this actuality, we
must, to a certain extent, and to a greater extent than Wally has to this
point, lay this spectral being aside, or manifest it and see what changes.

So we come
to the section of the series I’ve called a ghost story. I think of it this way
because we get to witness, sort of, the coalescence of the being into presence.
Barry Allen returns. Imagine, for a moment, the celebration the world over if
somehow Marx emerged unscathed from the clutches of death. Imagine every
Marxist clamouring to study with him, to sit at his feet and hear his wisdom.
Imagine his disappointment in how it’s all turned out. This is exactly what
happens when Barry Allen returns to Central City and is confronted by what
Wally has become, and by what has become of the world he left behind. We have
seen, repeatedly, that one of the impetuses of Wally West’s life, of his time
as the Flash, is to live up to the lessons he was taught, to make the world a
better, safer place, just like his uncle did. He reacts exactly as one might
expect when told that his efforts have been in vain, that he has failed, that
the ghost he has carried around with him for years is disappointed not only in
his performance, but in his appropriation of the ghost’s identity. Again,
imagine Marx returning and telling every Marxist on the planet that they weren’t
Marxists, that he was the only true Marxist. It is, unsurprisingly,
devastating. Now, because this is a superhero comic, and because to sully the
name of Barry Allen in the DC Universe is tantamount to heresy, it of course
turns out to not be Barry Allen. Professor Zoom, the Reverse Flash who plagued
the younger version of Barry in the recent Flash
television show, has travelled in time, taken on Barry’s appearance and
persona, and is wreaking insane havoc on Central City. It’s up to Wally to stop
him. But this is a Wally broken, a Wally who has been told that he has failed
to live up to the being that has accompanied him throughout his superheroic
career. There is only one way he can defeat this villain, and that is to
understand that the ghost he carries is one of his own making, that the
pressures of the spectre of Barry Allen are illusory and that Allen was never
the paragon that Wally has made him into; all he ever was was a man. With this
realization, Wally takes his first steps to becoming something more.

It may seem
silly, even ridiculous, to try to apply this Derridean notion of the
hauntological to a superhero comic. What’s important to take away from the
theoretical base is the idea of the being versus the presence. The being, the
ghost, is never what was the original, but what we carry with us as our
perception of the original. What this part of The Flash allows us to theorize is the way in which the present,
the “presencing” of the being demonstrates this fact. When Derrida read his
book, the neo-liberal machine may well have feared the spectre of Marx, but it
was a spectre of their own conception, not anything intrinsically linked to the
man himself, much as the revered spectre of the Socialists and the Communists
is a spectre of their own conception. What is important, then, what Wally’s
experience teaches us, is that it is in our own best interests to acknowledge
that the ghost we carry is the ghost we made, and is not the person whose
presence creates a shell around the being.

There’s a
good chance that none of that made even remotely any sense, and a blog post is
not necessarily the best place to try to work out the ins and outs of Derridean
hauntology and its application to the superhero comic. As I was writing up one
of my 40 Years of Comics posts this week, it occurred to me that Charles Xavier
is a haunting presence in the Age of Apocalypse storyline. I likened his
presence to that of the “Third Man” than numerous explorers into isolated parts
of our planet have reported, a presence that is both individual and gestalt, a
companion and another self. Perhaps that is what I’m trying to get at with my
contention of the hauntological in The
Flash, that the being is a companion and another self, but that we often
forget that it is another self, and gift it with autonomy. But a ghost can’t
have autonomy, only nostalgia, only construction. A ghost is a memory, all in
our heads.

Wally moves
on next time. He comes back to the world, runs into old friends, old lovers,
and old enemies. Waid has told us a big story here, one that has forced both
the readers and the character to rethink everything they thought they knew. He
tells us some little stories next, the small steps Wally needs to take to come
back from the shock of Barry’s return, and to come out from beneath the shadow
he has been casting upon himself.